Hi all,

I’m on the receiving end of the break up under similar circumstances and I would like to shed some light as well as get any input from you.

I’m freshly out of a 5 year relationship with my ex. By freshly I mean less than a week. And that was the first time I’ve actually called him that. Sigh.

I am currently completing my final year of law school and he is starting his first job as a post graduate next week. He will be working in my hometown, and I am studying in his hometown.

We met at the university in his hometown, and we’ve been growing together since. I thought we were happy and just experiencing those uphill battles of love, only to find that our relationship had met its demise.

For the past 6 months, he has been detached and passive about the relationship. I tried everything in my power to revive him from what I thought was a phase. I asked him numerous times whether he knew why he was acting that way and if there was anything I needed to know, or that I could do to which he always replied that he didn’t/there isn’t.

I eventually couldn’t stand fighting for us to work on my own and confronted him about it. I confronted him about not wanting to be in the relationship and that although he hasn’t expressly told me, his actions show me so. He couldn’t pretend anymore and finally admitted it. He said that he hadn’t known how to tell me but he doesn’t want to be in any relationship right now; that he really was still in love with me but he just wanted to be on his own.
It turns out that he’s known that he did not want to be in the relationship any longer for 6 months but could not communicate that to me out of fear of disappointing me. I am devastated.

Saying we have had the greatest relationship is an understatement. Our friends and family have idolized our love. I have been grateful to God everyday that I have known him. I love him with all of me, and I have no doubt that his love was genuine as well. I’m hurt that he couldn’t be honest about how he was feeling from the start, but I do understand that letting go of us was extremely hard for him as well. He was the kind to endure pain in order to avoid disappointing me. But my disappointment resonates more from the fact that he wasn’t brave enough to tell me. He did no one any favors. He simply withdrew emotionally from the relationship and left me to connect the dots on my own.

I truly do still love this man. We’ve been through so much together, and I’m sad that it didn’t work out. I have not only lost my best friend, but an entire family as well. His mother was my mother. His sister my own . We are all deeply upset by all of this.

What I do take from the situation however is that we are both still really young, our lives are just beginning, and although I had hopes of going through that together, he felt stifled by the idea of commitment of that nature at such a young age. He feared losing his freedom. And although I feel that was at the expense of something truly amazing, I can’t expect him to give me what he’s not yet ready to. He chose himself over me. That is what gave him peace. I can’t be mad at him for that.

I may never be able to bring myself to speak to him again, I’m still a mess right now and I don’t think I can JUST be his friend. But I wish him all the desires of his heart. He is an incredible man and although the way he went about ending things was undesirable, there’s no love lost.

• This reply was modified 9 years, 6 months ago by Bonni_mor.